The governance of monitoring carbon farming initiatives in global food systems

Carbon farming is heralded as a key approach to reaching a climate-neutral European agriculture sector by academics, decision-makers across the European Union and many private actors. These ambitions are enshrined in the European Green Deal, which sets forth Europe’s action plan to meet the Paris Climate Agreement and reduce GHG emissions by 55% compared to 1990 levels by 2030. Description There are many different approaches and instruments for governments and the private sector to incentivise carbon sequestration in agri-food supply chain, which has led to a complex web of existing and proposed incentivisation schemes and business models. While the EU’s approach in the short term has been to foster voluntary-based, bottom-up, market-driven initiatives- it is contested whether this governance approach is addressing the challenges at hand, or whether it will ultimately lead to new challenges. This leads to the overarching objective of this study: to assess and evaluate governance challenges and inform the meta-governance styles of carbon farming in Europe. This project is a multi-disciplinary PhD project together with the Farming Systems Ecology group and the Public Administration and Policy group. It is supported by the Horizon Europe projects BENCHMARKS and Climate Farm Demo. It takes a bottom-up approach to understanding carbon farming: as a set of social practices that occur on farm, as a web of public, private and hybrid initiatives, and as a European-backed approach to sustainability with global implications. https://www.wur.nl/en/project/governance-of-carbon-farming-phd-project-mariana-debernardini.htm